Five years after co-founding Kickstarter, Perry Chen is moving up to the chairman’s office and being replaced by his co-founder Yancey Strickler. Another co-founder, Charles Adler, is moving to an advisory role. Kickstarter now boasts 5 million backers who have pledged close to a billion dollars.

Native advertising — like a brand’s Tumblr blog or a sponsored tweet — is generating a lot of hype. A new survey says ad people are ready to take it on en masse, but some wonder if it can scale or if it’s just a buzzword.

SnapChat is a mobile photo service that is spreading like a wildfire. The photo sharing app is seeing about 1,000 photos a second being shared and that has attracted some big name VCs who want to fund it. Benchmark’s Matt Cohler seems to be the winner

“Social capital” has been around for a while, but now VCs and other investors are starting to see opportunities in socially-valuable areas such as health and education. Cue an explosion across the technology industry.

Community-writing site Wattpad says over 70% of time spent on the service comes from users on tablets or smartphones. One of its most requested features is the ability to write and edit stories from mobile devices. So the company is rolling out “Create” functionality for Android.

paidContent 2012: At the Crossroads is today at The TimesCenter in New York. Hundreds of media, entertainment, info and tech execs will be there in person to talk about the best ways to make content pay. You can join us via our livestream.

As part of paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York, I’ll be talking with venture capitalist Fred Wilson about the future of media and with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about real-time politics.

As much as things change, one goal remains the same: the creation and evolution of sustainable business models that will support quality media, entertainment and information across platforms — and paidContent 2012 is all about meeting that goal.

In this occasional weekend column, if we asked people in the tech industry to share the apps they use, their favorite gadgets and most importantly, the songs that inspire them? Of course, we will get them to share their Spotify and Rdio playlists as well.

Last thirty days have been nothing but full of twists and turns in tech-land. Maybe it is the “bubble” or maybe it is just an upcycle, but it sure is exciting. Here some events from today, that have one common theme: good guys do finish first.

The new Forbes Midas List is out and it ranks the top 100 venture capitalists. The list ranks uber-VC Fred Wilson below those whose performance is average at best. I find the list confusing, thanks to an ambiguous and somewhat faulty methodology.

We’ll once again be live streaming the second Cleanweb Hackathon that will be held in New York City, this weekend! The “Cleanweb” is the trend of using information technology — software, the web, social media, mobile — to address resource constraints around energy, food and water.

Writer-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler recently reignited a long-standing debate over whether blogs should have comments or not. Critics argue that comments are mostly noise and are a waste of time, but blogs that don’t have them risk being seen as just a soap-box for their authors.

Two of the early investors of Twitter — Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital — are leaving Twitter’s board of directors. This is the latest shake-up in the long list of shake-ups at the San Francisco–based company.

The next big opportunity is in social upheavals and revolutions, said Union Square’s Fred Wilson. After the infrastructure of the Internet and the applications have been established, he said the next step is revolutions personified by Wikileaks, BitCoin, the Arab Spring and other changes.

The enthusiasm iPad users had for magazine apps seems to be waning, according to some recent numbers that show sales of many apps slipping. Hopefully some publishers are starting to realize that simply having an iPad app doesn’t qualify as a digital content strategy.

Some Google engineer gets paid $3.5 million to not leave, and finally people notice: Irrationality seems to be escalating in Silicon Valley, a place that, for some odd reason, is detached from the global economic reality. This is not going to be good for startups.

GigaOM TV rock-tobered this month, delivering a bevy of videos that will engage, entertain and quite possibly inspire. From business insights and optimal work habits, to cutting-edge inventions, see what you may have missed.

Data from CB Insights, a research firm that tracks the Venture Capital industry shows that seed investments, led by Internet startups, increased from mere one percent of all deals during the third quarter of 2009 to a whopping 11 percent of total deals a year later.

Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson came to Toronto earlier this week for a series of meetings with startups and venture investors, and to judge some young companies at a local DemoCamp, and said that the startup atmosphere in Toronto reminded him of New York.

During a recent interview in Toronto, venture investor Fred Wilson shared some thoughts about the recent “AngelGate” clash between “super-angels” and traditional VCs, as well as some of the big trends online that he is thinking about as he makes investments for Union Square Ventures.

Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson’s blunt opinions on the tech industry were on display today at the Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco. And he had some compelling justifications for his insults, even if they were mainly targeted at competitors of his portfolio companies.

The idea of the “lean startup,” where young companies make use of readily available tools and quick iteration to figure out their business without spending much money, might be trendy, but VC Ben Horowitz is not a fan. Today he debated lean startup proponent Fred Wilson.

Fred Wilson will be giving a talk at the 99% conference later this week entitled “10 Ways To Be Your Own Boss.” Prior to the talk, Wilson has provided a preview of his presentation, which gives his views on the various categories of entrepreneur.

Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s comments about the company’s evolution have sparked fear among developers of third-party apps that rely on the network. But even if his comments do mean Twitter is going to compete with them, shouldn’t they have seen this coming a long time ago?

Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson says he believes Twitter has reached an inflection point, where it is big enough and important enough to become the center of a new marketplace of businesses. But it’s not clear if the social network will ever fill that role.